In a move to bring about 100-megabit Internet connections to 100 million U.S. homes by 2020 the FCC wants to make remote medicine a reality.
The FCC wants so see the creation of a health care broadband infrastructure fund to make sure all health care facilities, including rural ones, have adequate connectivity. At the very least, clinics, hospitals and even doctors offices should be encouraged to put health records into a secure database that can be accessed by patients and their authorized care givers, wherever they happen to be located, the report says.
Video-consultation and the ease of passing medical documents over long distances over secure servers could help save lives, the FCC report suggests. In addition, video consultation and other "telehealth" techniques can save money by giving facilities remote access to world-class specialists without having them on their payroll.
The broadband plan said avoiding the costs of moving patients from correctional facilities and nursing homes to emergency departments and physician offices could result in annual savings of 1.2 billion U.S. dollars.
Simply by switching all providers to electronic health systems with on-screen reminders to prompt physicians to prescribe influenza and pneumonia vaccinations could save up to 39,000 lives annually, according to a study cited in the FCC's report.
National adoption of electronic health records could save more lives by alerting physicians and patients of dangerous drug allergies and drug interactions when the doctor is entering the prescription. According to one study, this alone could result in a net savings of as much as 371 billion dollars for hospitals and 142 billion dollars for physicians over the next 15 years.
But to achieve these plans the United States has some catching up to do. According to the FCC, the U.S. "ranks in the bottom half (out of 11 countries) on every metric used to measure adoption, including use of electronic medical records (10th), electronic prescribing (10th), electronic clinical note entry (10th), electronic ordering of laboratory tests (eighth), electronic alerts/prompts about potential drug dose/interaction problems (eighth) and electronic access to patient test results (seventh)."
There are also some exciting possibilities in mobile health delivery via laptops, smartphones and other portable devices.
Not only do portable devices enable physicians to access laboratory results, images and drug data from wherever they happen to be, they also can allow patients to monitor vital signs such as glucose levels, blood pressure and other data, and to transmit that data to physicians, caregivers or clinics.
Lifescan, a Johnson & Johnson company, already offers an iPhone application that connects to a glucose monitor to transmit data to a patient's caregiver or physician. Google also provide the facility for storing medical records.
Google Health enables users to organize their health information in one place and share the information securely with a family member, doctors or caregivers. In the U.S. patients may even gather medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies.
While such online databases have raised issues of security, many users have praised their usefulness. As a single mother of a 13 year old daughter and a registered nurse, Linda Macomber started using Google Health nearly two years ago when it first launched in May of 2008.
"What I like about Google Health is that you have instant access to your health information so you do not have to rummage through your bathroom cabinet to patch together a list of your current prescriptions. It's all stored in one central place and available securely on the web," Macomber says.
Dr Taylor, a gynecologist who has been in private practice for over 20 years, uses Google Health to send lab results to her patients securely via a partnership Google has with Quest Diagnostics. Over 60 percent of her patients use Google Health and she has even set up a laptop in her waiting room and encourages her patients to sign up for Google Health to get their lab results online.
"With Google Health, patients can get their lab results really quickly, they do not have to wait for a month to get a paper copy in the mail. They can review the lab result and they have a little note from me and they know I have tried to do something to help them. It's very proactive, it allows them to take greater control over their health," Dr Taylor says.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Rob Welham
Quelle/Source: Xinhuanet, 22.03.2010
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
